a teenage guide to godhood Isi Ogwu
Every city has a soul, it seeps out of cracks and weak places, reaches inside us where we can’t see. It makes something out of all us, roots us in place. A city has power, to be taken and moulded. That shapes and changes in turn. The streets today are bloated with energy, the roads curved underneath us as we drive, empty as though carved out for us. If you pressed your ear against the ground, you could have heard it’s beating heart. “Are we seeing everyone tonight?” Addy says from the passenger seat. “I thought we were just getting food?” I let my answer trail off into a question. Addy doesn’t say anything, so I gesture vaguely towards the bag of food balanced on the centre console. She barely glances at it before turning back to me and shrugging with a practiced helplessness, and I have to work hard to keep my face neutral. I find it hard to give Addy a definitive ‘no’ most of the time. You can’t, really, because it tends to escalate any situation almost immediately. What begins as a simple question can become a shrieking argument at any moment. I try to relax my fingers over the faux leather wheel. They burn and itch and the tips, gripping too hard, trying to gather frayed edges back together. Right now, with Addy, it’s just easier to focus on trying to find our spot. I’m not usually the one that drive Today had been long because we had had an argument. At the end of the summer, Addy wanted to leave. She wasn’t happy, she said. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going, or what her plans were. The end of our shared childhood was approaching. In my mind, the two of us would continue as we were, together, moving forward and the others following. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want that also. “You’ve been happy here before,” I had said. Even as I begged I knew how weak I sounded. I was grasping for anything that I could do, to make her stay. I just wanted to be someone who could keep her here. We were sitting at the table in her kitchen. I was supposed to be helping Addy braid her hair. Instead, I wedged my nail in the cracks in her wooden table over and over again. Her hands moved down the thick bundle of hair at an aggressive pace. Her fingers twined in and out of the strands hypnotically, occasionally pulling down and away to straighten out the rest. She looked at war with herself, the braid pulled taut from her face, and her chin jutted almost angrily in the opposite direction. Her fingers kept on, pulling the sections between and around each other, like two fat spiders with legs going in and out, coiling another thick black rope down the side of her head. From between her teeth, she ground out, “Who said that I was satisfied?” I opened my mouth to say something, but the sound of a key at the door stopped me. It was her dad. Back already? A glance at my phone said it was almost 9. I hadn’t noticed it getting so late.
25
